'We must clean the country of the crawling mass of
maggots,' says the police commissioner as hundreds of thousands are put out
in the cold July 3, 2005

By Loveness
Jambaya

"The house I spent all my fortune on is gone. My
family is homeless. It all happened so quickly. One minute we heard rumours
about our houses being demolished, the next we were hurriedly packing our
family's belongings since the riot police were moving in fast. We watched
helplessly in the winter cold as bulldozers razed our houses. The house I
had spent four years building was destroyed in the blink of an eye. I had
borrowed money and used most of my salary on this house but it is no
more."

Monalisa* narrated her ordeal with despair in her
tear-filled eyes.

She is one of the many women and men
who have been devastated by the government-sanctioned twin operations
"Operation Restore Order" and "Operation Murambatsvina".

The latter literally translated means "no to dirt" and is being executed by
the local government authorities and the police. Monalisa lived
in Tongogara, in a home she bought through one of the many housing
co-operatives that emerged during the land reform programme. It is situated
a few kilometres outside Harare along the Harare-Bulawayo highway. The
entire settlement was destroyed despite the fact that people had lived there
for more than four years and paid rates to the local
council.

Observers estimate that more than 300 000 families
have been affected while about 22 000 informal traders have been arrested
for operating without licences among a host of other reasons. Those worst
affected - women, children, Aids patients and the elderly - have had to
brave the cold as they keep vigil over their property.

While it may be true that the sprouting of illegal settlements and informal
traders needed to be addressed, it is the manner in which it has been
carried out that has raised the ire of Zimbabweans and the international
community alike.

The question is: why did the authorities
allow the situation to get out of hand in the first place? Their argument
centres on the need to return the city of Harare to its former "sunshine
status".

Yet what "sunshine" is possible when the devastating
impact of the exercise on its citizens' dignity and humanity is completely
ignored? More disturbing is that these are the experiences of
Zimbabweans at a time when the country is neither under siege nor at
war.

The callousness of the authorities was aptly captured in
a statement by Augustine Chihuri, Zimbabwe's police commissioner, at a
ceremony where he said: "We must clean the country of this crawling mass of
maggots ..."

His statement was cruel, unwarranted and an
insult to the dignity of Zimbabweans.

And if this was not
enough, approximately 30 members of the Bulawayo-based activist group Women
of Zimbabwe Arise were arrested on June 18 for protesting against the
state's continuing campaign against the urban poor. What do these actions
say about the attitude of the state towards its most vulnerable
citizens?

Displaced families have been put into temporary
shelters - vegetable stalls, tents and farms - where there are neither
suitable sanitary facilities nor fresh water. And those who are here are
lucky - many more are living in the open. I shudder to think of how women,
already traumatised by their forced removal, are managing to maintain their
families.

And it's made even worse by the continued
shortages of mealie meal and other basic commodities.

Zimbabwean media are filled with images of homeless women and children who,
like Monalisa, have been stripped of their livelihood. The Daily
Mirror quoted Shamiso Makamba, 23, who is living on the banks of the
Mukuvisi River with her three children, all under five years
old.

"Our lives have been destroyed. I was living in the
Joburg Lines [in Mbare] with my younger brothers and sister while I made a
living selling vegetables at the bus terminus. Now that they have destroyed
our houses and prohibited us from selling our wares from Mbare Musika, we do
not know what to do next," she said.

Fortunately Monalisa
is still employed as a primary school teacher in one of Harare's
high-density suburbs, Warren Park. While she has managed to keep her family
alive, all her hard work has been "taken away by the stroke of a pen", she
said.

"I have nowhere to go with my children. I have spent
four days sleeping in the cold. Even if I get a place to live, I do not have
the money to pay rent and transport to go to work. My husband is unemployed
and I have three children who are all in school.

"I do
not know how they are going to cope with the situation.
"Accommodation is a problem in the city as several more affordable cottages
I could have gone to rent with my family have been destroyed. Even Aeneas
Chigwedere, the education minister, has admitted that schoolchildren who
lived in these illegal homes have been forced to drop out of school. However
his ministry is assessing the extent of the problem before they can act on
the matter. But how long will it take for them to assess the matter while
children miss out on classes?"

Monalisa has to start from
scratch. Her children have been deprived of their right to a decent
shelter.

"I have been made homeless in my country of origin,
where can I go for refuge? We hope they are going to do something as this is
a disaster."

She said she could only pray for divine
intervention: "May God intervene before we perish."

*Not
her real name.

.. Loveness Jambaya is the Zimbabwe
representative of the Gender and Media Southern African Network. This
article is part of the Gender Links GEM Opinion and Commentary
Service

As we trooped wearily out of Wembley Stadium that July night
20 years ago, my schoolfriends and I were convinced that Africans would
never again starve. It was exhilarating to be part of what we saw as the
Live Aid solution. To be fair, we were only 15 and had been assured our
small contribution to the millions of pounds raised was the best response to
the continent's plight.

Click to enlargeAside from
Freddie Mercury in a white vest, the most haunting image of the day had been
the grotesque footage of stick-thin Ethiopian children clinging to life as
The Cars' soundtrack Drive filled the stadium. But since then, more than
£200 billion has been spent on African aid and yet, as I witnessed during
five years living in Africa, those appalling scenes of starvation
endure.

Large swathes of the continent are less prosperous now than
when Bob Geldof called on me and my classmates to Feed the World and an
African life is shorter and more precarious than ever. African girls are
still more likely to be raped than learn to read, and 30,000 of the
continent's children die each day from preventable illnesses. The Aids
pandemic is hollowing out African society, leaving a community of orphans
and grandparents.

Despite its vast mineral wealth, Africa is poorer per
capita now than in 1985 and remains woefully behind other developing
continents in terms of economic growth and competitiveness.

Ghana is
a prime example of Africa's squandered potential. In 1957, when it became
the continent's first nation to achieve independence from a colonial power,
the former Gold Coast was much richer than South Korea and Malaysia. While
those Far East countries prospered, Ghana's citizens now rank among the
poorest in the world.

Although rich in mineral resources, it has been
hamstrung by the endemic corruption that has turned so many of Africa's
bread baskets into basket cases.

Robert Mugabe's recent destruction
of Zimbabwe's economy, unchallenged by his African counterparts, bears
testament to the West's impotence in the face of autocrats who have turned
grand larceny into an art form.

A "Make Corruption History" campaign
might not have such a glamorous ring to it, but with nearly £1.5 billion
being spirited out of Africa each year into secret accounts, the issue
euphemistically known as "bad governance" is an obvious priority.

In
Africa, where the fast track to personal wealth is through politics, corrupt
leaders could easily be ostracised internationally and the bankers who hold
their ill-gotten gains should be exposed as grubby fences of looted goods.
Take the case of Africa's last absolute monarch, King Mswati III of
Swaziland, whose contempt for the poverty of his people is infamous. His
tiny kingdom is kept afloat by £14 million in aid each year - almost a
million from Britain alone. The Sherbourne-educated ruler last year lavished
almost £9 million on palaces, parties and cars, without overt censure from
the West.

Meanwhile, 40 per cent of Swazis are infected with HIV/Aids
and most live on less than 50p a day. And yet, under recommendations by Tony
Blair's Commission for Africa, Swaziland will be among needy nations sharing
an extra £13 billion in aid by 2010 and another £13 billion after
that.

It is almost impossible to imagine how such great slabs of cash
will ever deliver prosperity to those outside the political elites, unless
conditions are imposed on how the money is spent.

Live 8 is correct
in shifting the focus on to trade. A cow in Europe receives more cash
support each year than an African. This grotesque anomaly can be corrected
only by removing agricultural subsidies in the developed world and allowing
African farmers to compete on a level playing field. Debt reduction, "smart"
aid packages and a review of trade laws would help to provide more capital
to the continent. But true self-sufficiency in Africa can be achieved only
in tandem with proper governance and a respect for property
rights.

Most Africans knew nothing about Live Aid or what was being done
in their name back in 1985. It was a crucial ingredient to the tragedy.
Today that is no longer true. The internet and satellite television meant
that Africans could not only watch Live 8 but stage their own parallel
concerts in a unique global event.

Today, millions of Africans with
only a limited education are as consumed by the technological revolution as
anyone in the developed world. The communications revolution is informing
Africans about the corruption of their own leaders and raising awareness of
trade and employment opportunities. This, more than a few billion pounds of
aid, will contribute to a lasting change in attitudes needed to rid Africa
of its dictators and corruption.

. Jane Flanagan was an Africa
correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph between 2000 and 2005.

US Renews Call for End to Zimbabwe Slum-Clearance
Campaign By David Gollust Washington 01 July
2005

The United States Friday renewed its call for an end to the
Zimbabwean government's widely criticized urban slum clearance campaign. The
comments followed reports of at least three deaths in the demolition of a
shanty-town near the capital, Harare, Thursday.

The United States has
been a persistent critic of the government of Zimbabwean President Robert
Mugabe.

But the slum clearance project, ostensibly aimed at reducing
crime in urban areas, has drawn some of the sharpest U.S. criticism to date,
with one official recently calling the demolition campaign
obscene.

State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack opened Friday's news
briefing with a volunteered statement reiterating a call for an immediate
end to the demolitions, which the United Nations estimates have left
$200,000 people homeless.

Mr. McCormack said Zimbabwe's problems
cannot be remedied by what the State Department has termed a heavy-handed
crackdown on the country's poor. "The government of Zimbabwe must respect
the rule of law and address the country's serious governance problems if it
wants to reverse the sad course that that country is currently on," he
said.

Mr. McCormack said the issue is a matter of high-level attention in
the Bush administration, and has been raised in U.S. contacts with the
United Nations, the African Union, South Africa and other concerned
parties.

The spokesman said it was also discussed at last week's London
preparatory conference for the upcoming G-8 summit meeting, where British
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said African leaders have a high responsibility
to not turn a blind eye to what is going on in Zimbabwe.

U.S.
officials, who say they have little leverage with Harare, have been
privately critical of South Africa for what they see as a lack of
assertiveness in its dealings with the Mugabe government on human rights
issues.

Spokesman McCormack said the administration officials are
awaiting the report of a special United Nations envoy Anna Tibaijuka, who is
in Zimbabwe investigating the slum-clearance program.

In the
meantime, he said the United States has allocated an additional $750,000 to
the International Organization for Migration, which is assisting displaced
persons in Zimbabwe.

About $1 million had been previously committed to
the Geneva-based organization for its Zimbabwe activities.

South African President Thabo Mbeki was to meet with officials
of the Movement for Democratic Change on the weekend. This would be the
first meeting between the region's dominant political figure and Zimbabwe's
opposition since the MDC suspended discussions with South Africa following
March general elections in protest over what it said was biased mediation on
Mr. Mbeki's part.

South African Foreign Ministry spokesman Ronnie
Moemepa confirmed that a meeting was scheduled, but said he did not know
which MDC representatives would be meeting Mr. Mbeki. Analyst Chris Maroleng
of the Institute of Security Studies in South Africa said Mr. Mbeki's new
approach to the MDC means he understands it is a key element in any
resolution of the Zimbabwe crisis.

Sydney Sithole
Reporting from MutareListen to Sydney Sithole Reporting from MutareIrwin
Chifera Reporting from Caledonia FarmListen to Irwin Chifera Reporting from
Caledonia FarmInterview with Jesse MajomeListen to Interview with Jesse
MajomeInterview with Displaced ZimbabweanListen to Interview with
Displaced Zimbabwean

The African Union is sending a special
rapporteur on a fact-finding mission to Zimbabwe to examine the impact of
the Harare government's six-week campaign in which hundreds of thousands of
unauthorized houses were destroyed, leaving an undetermined but large number
of people homeless. A statement on the AU's Web site identified the special
rapporteur as Bahame Tom Nyanduga, a member of the African Commission on
Human and Peoples' Rights.

The statement said that Mr. Nyanduga would
conduct a fact-finding mission between June 30 and July 4. In Zimbabwe he is
to meet with authorities and with "relevant human rights organizations," the
statement said. Mr. Nyanduga will visit the communities of Hatcliff, Mbare,
Mufakose and Chitungwiza, and the Harare-area holding camp of Caledonia
Farm, among other locations. He will also go to rural villages where people
have been relocated after losing their homes.

Meantime, United
Nations special envoy Anna Tibaijuka continued to assess the consequences of
the government's housing crackdown. She traveled by plane to the eastern
border town of Mutare late Friday after visiting Caledonia farm earlier in
the day and Porta Farm, site of another holding camp, on Thursday. Sources
said the displaced begged her for help, to which she responded that all
parties would work to find a "permanent solution." Reporter Sydney Sithole
of VOA's Studio 7 for Zimbabwe described Mrs. Tibaijuka's visit to
Mutare.

Displaced people living at Caledonia Farm, 25 kilometers
southeast of Harare, told another Studio 7 reporter that conditions there
remain bleak. Mrs. Tibaijuka toured Caledonia Farm on Friday morning. Her
staff handed out bread and juice to the crowd of displaced people. Thousands
of families were moved to the camp after they lost their homes in Operation
Murambatsvina. Irwin Chifera visited Caledonia Farm today and filed a report
on the conditions there.

One human rights activist said that the U.N.
envoy's visit has allowed Mrs. Tibaijuka to measure the scale of the crisis
in Zimbabwe. Spokeswoman Jessie Majome of the National Constitutional
Assembly said reports in the official Herald newspaper indicating Mrs.
Tibaijuka has endorsed Operation Murambatsvina should be taken with a grain
of salt. Ms. Majome told reporter Carole Gombakomba of VOA's Studio 7 for
Zimbabwe that she is encouraged the international community has become
involved.

The United Nations special envoy faces certain challenges in
getting a true picture of events from victims of Operation Murambatsvina.
Some refused to tell the U.N. delegation their stories for fear of reprisal
by state security agents. Mrs. Tibaijuka tried to allay such fears by taking
testimony behind closed doors.

Sources among civil society
organizations said she heard moving testimony from victims of the state
crackdown including one young woman who gave birth on the rubble of her
demolished home. Another victim spoke with reporter Chris Gande of VOA's
Studio 7 for Zimbabwe, asking that her name not be divulged.

Be a nurse or a doctor seeking work
rather than a genuine refugee fleeing oppression in Zimbabwe

Nick
CohenSunday July 3, 2005The Observer

Take two nurses from
southern Africa in the week of the G8 summit. The first is a Malawian who
wants to escape to Britain because she's tired of striving for
next-to-nothing in flyblown hospitals and looks forward to making 10 or 20
times her salary in a job with the NHS.The second has fled Zimbabwe to
escape Mugabe. Malawi isn't a safe place for a Zimbabwean to be. The local
cops are friends with Zanu-PF, as are the ANC's finest in the South African
police. There are stories of dissidents being handed over to the goons. She,
too, wants to reach Britain and find sanctuary in the imperial mother
country, a land she has heard which prides itself on its liberal good
faith.

If you listened to Tony Blair last week, you'd assume there'd
be no contest. 'Genuine asylum seekers, or people whose claims are upheld
from Zimbabwe, will continue to get asylum here,' the PM said. The
asylum-seeking nurse will be fine, as long as her fear of persecution is
genuine. By contrast, our Malawian nurse should have no chance. Since 1997,
when dictator Hastings Banda died aged 101, and proved in his long struggle
to cling on to his worthless life that only the good die young, there hasn't
been significant persecution in Malawi. She's bogus and, as the press and
politicians have said for years, Britain welcomes genuine refugees but has
no time for economic migrants.The nurses will find that the truth is the
exact opposite. All the fuss about New Labour temporarily suspending the
deportation of Zimbabweans for fear of spoiling this weekend's euphoric
self-satisfaction missed the point that the government has done its best to
stop all refugees from Zimbabwe getting to Britain in the first place by
imposing visa controls.

I asked Sarah Harland of the British Zimbabwe
Association to name one opponent of Mugabe who had been granted a visa. She
laughed. The whole point of visas is to stop refugees. The more wounds you
can show, the faster you are shown the high commission's
door.

Zimbabweans go to Malawi and South Africa. The few with the money
and inclination buy fake passports and rely on people smugglers to find a
way into Britain. They've no choice, but their desperation means that a
government that has driven them into the arms of people smugglers can
maintain they're con-artists using criminal gangs who aren't really
Zimbabweans.

'People were claiming to be from Zimbabwe and turning
out to be from somewhere else,' said Tony Blair last week, while former
Foreign Secretary Robin Cook went on Radio 4 to denounce the people
smugglers. They sounded like Dr Frankenstein railing against his
monster.

Our Malawian nurse, economic migrant though she is, will sail
through immigration control. The shortage of nurses will guarantee her a
work permit and once she has done a short course, she can go on the wards.
Last year, Britain took 511 nurses from Nigeria, 391 from Zimbabwe, 354 from
Ghana and 64 from Malawi.

If our Zimbabwean nurse said she was an
economic migrant, she'd be fine. If she made the mistake of telling the Home
Office or Foreign Office she was a victim of political persecution, she
could be stopped from entering by visa restrictions or arrested at
Heathrow.

Georgia Benjamin, health officer of the World University
Service which helps foreign academics, told me she sees about a dozen
asylum-seeking doctors a week. While the NHS takes their colleagues from all
corners of the world, they sit around waiting to hear if they will be
deported. They're unable to practise and unable to take the exams which
would allow them to practise.

The Department of Health has a code of
conduct which prohibits hospitals taking nurses from sub-Saharan Africa. But
because New Labour is the way it is, the code doesn't apply to private
recruitment agencies. It only stops British hospitals deliberately seeking
African nurses. If a nurse from Malawi is picked up by an agency and
applies, trusts are free to take her.

This licence to depopulate African
hospitals can hurt the nurses. Howard Catton, of the Royal College of
Nursing, tells stories of women falling into the hands of gangster agencies
which take their passports and their wages. But a survey he organised with
the King's Fund found that most were happy. If you were a talented nurse
working in a country which was burnt out by Aids and corruption, you'd be
happy to get here, too.

The result is a catastrophic flow of medical
staff from south to north. When there are only 600,000 healthcare workers
for the 682 million people living in sub-Saharan Africa, when only 60 of the
500 doctors trained in Zambia since independence are still there, you can
give as much to charity as you want, but you won't save the children from
preventable deaths if there's no one to administer the drugs.

The
best side of New Labour is that it has doubled health spending since it came
to power. Such has been the increase in medical training, Britain will soon
be self-sufficient in doctors.

It sounds marvellous, but James Johnson,
the chairman of the British Medical Association, warns that this happy state
won't last for long. The US will need to employ 200,000 more doctors and
800,000 more nurses in the next 15 years. The wages are the best in the
world, America is a great place to live and Johnson predicts that doctors
and nurses will be sucked in from every English-speaking country, including
Britain.

Perhaps it will only be when we know what it's like to spend
money training doctors to be poached by foreigners, that the British will
learn how hypocritical and self-defeating their bogus treatment of poor
world migrants has been.

Pipe dreams and Mafia dons

As the
sun beat down on Sicily last summer, there was the traditional water
shortage and the luckless residents of Palermo knew who to
blame.

Ever since the Mafia brought the island's water vendors under its
control in the 1870s, it has been determined to stop Sicilians getting a
reliable supply. 'They aren't interested in repairing damaged systems
because that would mean losing business,' explained Roberto della Sora,
director of the Legambiente environmental group.

Indeed it would. The
dons want pipes to leak so they can sell water from their private wells at
exorbitant rates and add to the $1.4 billion they've stolen in the last 20
years from funds for new reservoirs which were never built.

The
Sicilian re-formed communists campaign on the slogan 'Water in Every House!
No to the Mafia!' Their killer fact is that 40 per cent of Palermo's water
vanishes through leaking pipes.

Back in Britain last week, the
Environment Agency warned of a hosepipe ban, while Ken Livingstone told
Londoners not to flush if they had 'just had a pee'. Neither mentioned that
according to Livingstone's own London Assembly, the killer fact about the
shortage is that Thames Water loses 40 per cent of London's water through
leaking pipes at 1,000 million litres a day, or enough to fill 17 Olympic
swimming pools every hour.

In these circumstances, appeals for restraint
will be hopeless. We will think of the execs' seven-figure salaries and the
shareholders who have grown fat by sucking at the public teat, and let the
taps run.

Unless, that is, privatisation moves on and the incompetents
are replaced by the Mafia. The boys from Palermo couldn't be worse managers
than we have already and they'd be much better at confronting householders
who insist on keeping their bathrooms clean and lawns
healthy.

Save me from café society

The Independent reports
that a recruit to Richard Curtis's office saw him slumped over his desk,
head in hands. Half-an-hour later, he was in the same stricken state. 'The
thing is,' explained a colleague, 'Richard's very worried about
Africa.'

Maybe. Or maybe he was weeping tears of rage against the BBC for
failing to save him from himself and allowing The Girl in the Café to be
broadcast.

Curtis is a kind and good man. But by the time Gina (right,
played by Kelly Macdonald) had burst into the G8 and, with clicking fingers
and a lump in the throat, persuaded the world's leaders to set about poverty
with the vigour of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland putting on a show in the
old barn, I was ready to donate money to the Common Agricultural Policy or
join Zanu-PF or start a new war between Ethiopia and Eritrea... anything
rather than sit through any more of this monument to vacuity.

WHEN we live in a society of
excess, it seems absurd that so many people around the world and
particularly in Africa die from poverty. However, Michael Portillo (Comment,
last week) is right in that we cannot simply pump money into Africa and
elsewhere without ensuring that it really does go to the front
line. With the 20th anniversary of Live Aid, I cannot
but wonder whether the money raised then did go to help the people it was
supposed to or whether some inadvertently helped to prop up corrupt and
brutal dictatorships that make up too many governments in
Africa.

Yes, we should all strive to
eliminate poverty in the world but more needs to be done to bring about an
end to regimes such as Mugabe's in Zimbabwe. Jack Straw may talk a good
talk, but what actually has the world community done to bring this tyrant to
book?

Michael Newbold
Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex

GLOBAL PARTNERS:
Portillo suggests re-colonisation but why not a new partnership with Africa?
Africa will only be saved with good
governance.

It is only the West mortifying itself
over its colonial past that prevents it offering a new partnership. We help
build transparency in government, assist in education building, rejig trade
relationships and supervise in partnerships. If some think tank isn't
thinking along these lines, it should be.

It
might even add some gloss while the US and the UK take a battering on
Iraq.

John Norman
London N12

PREVENTION AND CURE: You
report that Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor is going to lead the Roman
Catholics in Edinburgh in a demonstration to reduce poverty in Africa (News,
last week).

I think his time would be better
spent going to Rome and arguing with the Pope against the man (not God) made
laws about contraception and the distribution of condoms. Reducing unwanted
pregnancies and the spread of HIV/Aids would do more to reduce poverty than
billions of pounds and dollars.

Professor
Eva Kohner London
W14

SHOW US THE MONEY: Perhaps the
media could report on the use of public donations and government aid to the
suffering people, instead of endlessly focusing on Geldorfian
simplicity.

Perhaps someone could follow the
movement of donations from members of the public, through to their use and
effect on the apparent targets.

David
Russell Vilamoura,
Portugal

NO QUICK FIX: There are
sometimes things in life you can't "fix". Perhaps we can't "just fix"
Africa.

Human rights violations by the regime government in Zimbabwe should never be
treated with kid gloves by the free world! It's a pity African silidarity
ignores crying voices of the traumatised people of Zimbabwe and instead
appease a clever and cunning dictatorship.Why does the government ban
international journalists if it is not to prevent them from reporting its
evil machinations. 'Silent diplomasy' is silent assassination, a stub in the
back by fellow Africans without compassion of the victims of hatred. Urban
people are paying for the government's mismanagement and corruption and
challenge to their one party sate
dictatorship.

Who will protect the
poor if their own governmemt kicks them away as dirty (tsvina)."Operation
Murambatsvina" is wicked and callous, its motives are clearly to decimate
the population.The world shoud take the cues, Didimus Mutasa is on record
for saying Zimbabwe only needs a polulation of 6 million and so they will
kill.Do we wait for a genocide do take place then eveil can be stopped? How
can anyone justify the madness of throwing people out of their homes in the
coldest month of the year? This should treated as a a crime agaoinst
humanity.People's means of livelihood, shelter, children's education and
security all have been destroyed mercilessly with armed men! Imagine being
forced to distoy your own shelter at gun point! Think of the people now
starving, those who have died and those who will die! Think of all those
weakened by HIV /AIDS sleeping outsite homes out in the cold in June! The
leaders distroyed the economy, they distroyed people's jobs and now they
distroyed their homes and means of livelihood.

The world should never
be hoodwinked into thinking there is government planning to help poor
people! You don't bring Youth militia, riot police and armed soldiers with
guns beating up people making them refugees in their own country then and
turn and say that this is good for the people! Right now people are
frightened of their own governmemnt, is that an internal affair? How many
millions have now become refugees and being are degraded in other
countries?Botswana is creating an electric fence to block Zimabweans and
introduced flogging of Zimbabwean refugees-Is that an internal problem?
People are being tortured home and away! Zimbabwe is now a police state and
people are not free!The African leaders are all pathetic in failing to
rebuke a clear case of human rights violations.They claim that it is an
internal problem when they are receiving an influx of refugees whom they are
mercelessly abusing in their countries.Somalia moved to the present state
bit by bit when the shameless OAU now callin itself AU watched at a distance
and dismissed as an internal problem.Now Somalia is no more and it has
disintegrated into War lords's territories sponsored by Arabs.

Let us
say "NO!" to dictatorship.Honorable men and women with conscience should
resign from a cruel organisation. MDC is silent when all this happening and
some are ven coniving with the ruling party!

ROBERT Mugabe has ruled out ever
trying to get back into the "useless" Commonwealth during a blistering
attack on Tony Blair and his "gay gangsters".

In his first interview
for more than a year, Mugabe also insisted he had discussed the issue at
length during a meeting with Prince Charles, where he expressed his
admiration and respect for the Royal Family.

The 81-year-old did,
however, say he would open his doors to Foreign Office diplomats in a bid to
restore relations between Zimbabwe and Britain.

Mugabe has been
ostracised by the international community after a million of his own people
were made homeless in a campaign to punish opposition supporters for voting
against his ruling party Zanu (PF).

The Zimbabwean president said in
Harare: "If Tony Blair wants to open his doors and he wants us to open our
doors, fine. His people can come here. My people can go to London and mend
our relations."

But he dismissed speculation that members of the
Commonwealth Secretariat would be able to persuade him to try to rejoin the
53-nations 'club' that takes in roughly a third of the world's
population.

He described the Commonwealth as "a useless body which has
treated Zimbabwe in a dishonourable manner". Mugabe told the London-based
magazine New African that he wants his rejection of the Commonwealth written
in the hearts of the people of Zimbabwe.

"We will establish relations
with individual members of the Commonwealth; there is nothing wrong with
that. And even if we get a Britain which is not run in the same way in
regard to our relations as the Britain of Tony Blair - fine.

"We will
mend our relations, and this is what I told Prince Charles when we met in
Rome recently at the Pope's funeral."

It is the first reference Mugabe
has made to his handshake with the heir to the British throne on April
8.

A Clarence House official said: "The Prince of Wales was caught by
surprise and not in a position to avoid shaking Mr Mugabe's hand." But
according to Mugabe, the two men had a long chat and recalled the night of
April 17, 1980, when the Prince attended Zimbabwe's independence
celebrations.

"We discussed relations and we said we have tremendous
respect for the Queen. Every member of the Royal Family has been to Zimbabwe
and we have tremendous respect for every member of that family.

"We
have souvenirs of their visits here. We respect them and we continue to
respect them." But that "respect" excludes Tony Blair, whom Mugabe says is
surrounded by people he refers to as "Blair's gay gangsters".

A
source close to the ruling Zanu (PF) party, who asked not to be named, said:
"It's a typical Mugabe ploy. He is appealing to the British people over the
head of Tony Blair.

"Mugabe is clever. He uses the same tactic with the
South Africans and threatens Thabo Mbeki whenever he can. He says to African
leaders that Mbeki - who is George Bush's point man in Africa - wants Mugabe
to go slow on land reform because he [Mbeki] is a puppet of the white
man."

Last week Scotland on Sunday revealed that low-level talks between
Zimbabwean and British officials had already opened in Harare on the subject
of repairing long-damaged relations before the start of the G8 meeting at
Gleneagles.

Mbeki and his Tanzanian counterpart, Benjamin Mkapa, are
expected to tell Britain and other G8 countries to seek a fast agreement
with Zimbabwe in order to stave off hunger and chaos in a key southern
African country.

They would like to see Mugabe retire and live
comfortably with his young wife Grace and their three children at a £7m
palace in the once all-white suburb of Borrowdale in Harare.

The
understanding would be that Britain and the Commonwealth Secretariat would
then deal with the next Zimbabwean leader Joyce Mujuru, the vice president,
who is married to one of Zimbabwe's richest men, Solomon Mujuru.

He was
the commander of Mugabe's military machine during the war against
white-ruled Rhodesia between 1972 and 1979.

Meanwhile, diplomats in
Harare were stunned to hear that Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, executive director
of the Nairobi-based UN-Habitat and a close friend of Tanzania's president
Ben Mkapa, who supports Mugabe, had told the People's Daily in China that by
demolishing thousands of shantytown homes, Mugabe had declared war "not on
poor people but on poverty".

She was in Harare to study the scope of the
recent eviction of "illegal squatters and dwellers" who, say Zimbabwean
insiders, supported the opposition Movement for Democratic Change at the
election in March. Television pictures showed her being handed a starving
baby at Porta Farm in Zimbabwe.

"The baby is starving," she
exclaimed, handing it back immediately. "Give it food." But a voice off
screen said - "There is no food."

The legal affairs spokesman for the
MDC, David Coltart, told Scotland on Sunday that he expected Mugabe to start
demolishing the homes of anyone who opposes him. "I have no doubt that if
the Mugabe regime can think of a pretext that it can sell to Africa, it will
do anything to undermine the opposition," he said.

"That could easily
include raiding homes of opposition figures. I suspect that they will allege
that leaders are individually guilty of some serious offence and use that to
justify further harassment."

He added: "Mugabe said that his intention
was to bury the opposition, and he and his cronies will undoubtedly do
everything possible to destroy the opposition."

When Elvis released his hit song In
the Ghetto it made the whole world shiver with shame as you painted a
picture of the snow falling on a cold and hungry child in the ghetto, with
his mama crying, because she couldn't feed the little hungry mouth who cried
out for kai. And so it is today in Zimbabwe where thousands of Mamas
and their babies are about to face the freezing cold in a ghetto created by
Robert Mugabe or should I say Robber Mudgarbage and his gutless government.
This dictatorial dickhead is waging war on his own people while the world
watches and waits for the next over to be
bowled.

Trouble is, if we wait and watch too long
this mudguardhead Mugabe will destroy everything and everyone in his way and
before you can say Idiot Amin, Pol Pothead or Slobbering Sonofabitch, we
have genocide knocking at Zims door. So what can little old land of
the long white cloud do to rain on Rubbish Mugarbage's regime? Send over our
one warship our one warplane and a truckload of get well soon cards? Yeah
right. That's like sending kittens to Clive to fix up the
Lions.

Surely we can stand up to Zimbabwe in the same way as we
stood up to South Africa not that long ago. What Graeme Mourie, a man of
mana did, by turning his back on a test jersey for the peoples of the
rainbow nation was a big ask. Now Stephen needs to stand tall in the same
way and stay home.

The other bad bugger in this sad movie is the
part played by the ICC who refuse to see past profit and, just like other
fish heads who see human suffering as some one else's sin bin, their refusal
to stop this cricket tour is a stubborn reminder of who controls sport on
and off the field.

And that's what the ICC who don't see and
Rubberduck Mudguardhead who won't see have in common, and that is control at
all cost. He is hell-bent on revolution not resolution and when there is no
food, no whare and no future but violence for the innocent citizens of
Zimbabwe then it's time to pull up stumps and stay home.

Maybe
we should send Tana and the boys in black over there to do a bit of spear
tackling practise on Mudguards head or maybe we should get Billy Birmingham,
the 12th man to send him a song that would be the new national anthem for
Zimbabwe. And maybe the words of Elvis will wake up the world once again to
the hungry child in the ghetto.

If the voice is loud enough the
ears of the ICC will have to listen. At the moment there is a murmur of
support for Zimbabwe here in Aotearoa New Zealand that needs to be
microphoned by the voices in Parliament with a choir of korero from our
Black Caps who will wear a black armband if they do not boycott Mugabe's
madness.

To the uninformed, take the time to visit www.africantears.com and when you
understand, then make a stand, for the mama who is crying for the hungry
mouth she cannot feed in the ghetto. Arohamai to the many South Africans and
Zim expats living here in Tauranga today who must be hurting big time right
now.

LUSAKA, July 3
(Reuters) - Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa has made his anti-corruption
campaign the hallmark of his administration, hoping to persuade voters to
give him a second term in next year's elections.

Now it may well secure
his ousting.

Mwanawasa's graft-busting drive has won Zambia backing from
Western governments, who this year granted nearly $4 billion in debt relief
under the World Bank and International Monetary Fund's Highly Indebted Poor
Countries (HIPC) initiative.

Bilateral donors have also poured
millions of dollars into the impoverished southern African country,
burnishing its image as a can-do alternative to chaotic neighbours such as
Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But the campaign has also
won Mwanawasa powerful enemies within the circle of former President
Frederick Chiluba, the man the anti-graft efforts have largely targeted,
while some senior figures in his own administration are unsure of whether
they may be next in line for investigation.

The ruling Movement for
Multiparty Democracy (MMD) last month expelled former state vice president
Nevers Mumba after he called for an investigation into accusations of
corruption he made against the president.

Significantly the party did not
say whether it would probe the allegations and Mwanawasa cancelled the MMD's
internal polls planned in May to pick its candidate in the 2006 polls,
telling a public rally that his enemies had plotted to oust
him.

Mumba has rallied support around disgruntled MMD members while the
opposition is in talks to form a united front against Mwanawasa, a
combination which could pose a severe threat to the president's hopes for a
second term.

POLITICAL VENDETTA

Chiluba picked Mwanawasa as a
successor in 2001 after his own bid to change the constitution so he could
run for a third term failed. He has since called the anti-corruption
campaign a political vendetta and is known to be close to the president's
opponents such as Mumba.

"We have a very uninspiring presidency.
Mwanawasa does not have the stature and programmes that can deliver
prosperity to Zambia," Mumba told Reuters at his home in
Lusaka.

"This so-called anti-corruption crusade has been a charade.
Nearly four years later Mwanawasa's government has secured only one
conviction and he has refused to respond to charges I made about corruption
within the party he leads," Mumba added.

Zambia's Supreme Court this
year rejected a challenge brought against Mwanawasa's 2001 election on the
grounds that it was rigged. While it admitted that some state funding had
been used in Mwanawasa's electoral campaign, it said graft was not
widespread enough to invalidate the poll.

Zambia's graft credentials were
tested last month when the government withdrew corruption, fraud and abuse
of office charges brought against Mwanawasa ally Kashiwa Bulaya, who was
accused by investigators of diverting to private use millions of dollars
meant for AIDS drugs.

After weeks of vocal protests by foreign
ambassadors and opposition and human rights groups, the government announced
a climbdown and said that Bulaya's case would be reopened in the public's
interest -- but that failed to satisfy critics.

EASE UP

"The
mere fact that they tried to withdraw a case such as this one speaks volumes
about the government's commitment to fighting corruption," said Alfred
Chanda, professor of law and president of the Zambia chapter of the global
anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International.

Jotham Momba,
professor of politics at the University of Zambia, said he saw Mwanawasa
easing off the corruption campaign as he started to prepare for a
re-election campaign that could see him turning for help to some of the very
people who have been prosecuted.

"Therein lies the problem. This
re-election saga could prove very costly," Momba said. "It could be
Mwanawasa's downfall."

Momba also said that Mwanawasa had not delivered
on promises to deliver a new constitution that trimmed presidential powers
and removed colonial-era oppressive laws.

Instead Mwanawasa says he
wants that constitution enacted after 2006 elections. Analysts say such a
move would allow him, assuming he wins the poll, to argue that his
presidential term had only started under a new constitution -- giving him a
chance to try for a third term of office through the back door.

Years
of stringent fiscal discipline mean Mwanawasa has spent little on social
sectors, given the civil service no pay rise in the last years and has seen
doctors and nurses leave for better-paying jobs in South Africa, Britain or
the United States.

But he has squeezed donors for cash for infrastructure
development and reform of the state electricity company Zesco, ensuring a
sharp reduction in power outages.

With new investment in the copper
and cobalt mining industries, investors say new jobs are on the way, which
Mwanawasa is sure to trumpet on his campaign trail next year.

"The
president is committed to fighting corruption, and despite all the
constraints Zambia is growing. We are living the mandate handed to the MMD
by the Zambian people," said Vernon Mwaanga, secretary-general of the MMD.

Despite the hype - and has there ever been a Group
of Eight meeting so well trailed? - these annual summits tend to be
overtaken by events. What world leaders spend most time talking about are
the problems of the moment. It will be interesting, in due course, to find
out how much time Gleneagles devotes to global warming, debt relief and
overseas aid, and how much to Iran, Iraq, China, the price of oil and a
potential international economic crisis.This is not to dismiss the
efforts of our Prime Minister and Chancellor, in alliance with Bob Geldof,
Bono, Bill Gates, the economist Jeff Sachs, various aid organisations, the
churches and many others. Your correspondent is lost in genuine wonderment
that the worthy but traditionally boring subjects of overseas aid and debt
relief have become headline news, and captured the imagination and energy of
an entire generation.

With the interest in aid has come a reaction - and
a healthy dose of scepticism. Problems with the distribution of the funds
raised by the tsunami appeal have not helped. And President Mugabe's latest
outrage in Zimbabwe has been a reminder of how the scramble to help Africa
now is still blighted by the legacy of an earlier scramble for
Africa.

A package of debt relief has already been agreed by the Group of
Seven finance ministers: the finance ministers and central bank governors of
the US, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Canada. (The G8 meeting is
the heads of government of these countries, plus Russia, plus streams of
hangers-on and extra guests.)

Economists have been pointing out that
debt relief can, by definition, help only the indebted and - trust the
International Monetary Fund to come out with this the week before Gleneagles
- that aid does not necessarily assist growth and can be counterproductive
if the inward flows of assistance raise the exchange rate and make the
economy less competitive (always assuming the recipient country actually has
an economy).

Nevertheless, the report by the Commission for Africa, after
a realistic examination of the arguments about corruption, arrived at the
conclusion that - given all the provisos about the need for good governance,
new investment and the eventual need for African economies to stand on their
own feet - massive doses of financial assistance were still
essential.

A lot has been learnt, and when hard-headed businessmen such
as Bill Gates become involved in the aid business, you can be sure they are
concerned, as President Bush clearly is, that aid really gets through. Even
so, the sceptics are probably right that there has been a certain naivety on
the part of public figures who suddenly discover a continent they knew
nothing about and think they can solve its problems by ticking off a
list.

And at the heart of the debates between the UK and certain other
governments (the US, Germany and Japan) about the form of debt relief and
the size of aid packages is the plain fact that the G8 are way below the aid
targets set by the United Nations decades ago - targets set well before pop
stars discovered there was a humanitarian crisis in Africa. Indeed, the very
concept of the Chancellor's supposedly clever device of an International
Finance Facility is a confession of failure: it is because rich nations will
not cough up enough money for aid that recourse is made to borrowing in the
financial markets against the security of promises to raise aid budgets in
the future.

For all the bickering, at least some appreciable progress
has been made in this area, which is more than one can say at the time of
writing for the Prime Minister's attempts at a breakthrough with President
Bush on the global warming front.

Did it not occur to our Prime
Minister that when he shamed our nation by backing President Bush's invasion
of Iraq, the people behind Bush, namely Cheney and Rumsfeld, were
principally interested in securing supplies of oil in the Middle East, and
the reason they wanted to secure oil supplies is that they do not, to quote
President Nixon, give an expletive deleted about global warming?

The
debate is moving in the US, but Blair was rash to assume he had any serious
influence on that debate, or that - obscene thought - this was 'payback
time' for Iraq. What we do have are the immortal words of President Bush in
a recent interview in the Times: 'There's an interesting confluence now
between dependency upon fossil fuels from a national economic security
perspective, as well as the consequences of burning fossil fuels for
greenhouse gases.'

Part of the background to this summit is the
instability in the world economy associated with the way the US is spending
way beyond its means, both in the public and private sectors, and piling up
debts as if there were no tomorrow. As Sushil Wadhwani, a former member of
the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, recently told the Society
of Business Economists, the accumulation of dollars by Asian economies means
that they now account for about 60 per cent of global foreign currency
reserves, although for only 20 per cent of global gross domestic
product.

The former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker,
recently said: 'At some point, both central banks and private institutions
will have their fill of dollars.' The Bank for International Settlements -
the Basel-based central bankers' bank - states in its annual report: 'The
dollar, in real effective terms, is no lower now than its average of the
last 30 years. Given how little the US trade deficit seems to have been
affected to date by dollar depreciation... some further movement seems
almost inevitable... [yet] a number of important creditor countries,
particularly in Asia, have taken significant steps to hold down the value of
their currencies against the dollar, thus impeding the needed downward
adjustment of the dollar.'

China is the big intervener in the exchange
markets and the great accumulator of dollars. The US may have defeated
Russian communism, but it lives in fear of China's one-party mixture of
communism and capitalism. It is fine for US institutions to buy up the
world, but all hell has been let loose in the US media because of the bid
from the China National Offshore Oil Corp (70 per cent owned by the Chinese
government) for Unocal, a US energy company with what is known in the trade
as a 'global reach' for scarce oil and gas resources.

The US has been
content to finance its huge trade deficit with other people's money, but
some of the other people have accumulated massive financial resources. As
the US economist Paul Krugman recently observed: 'Buying a company is a lot
cheaper, in lives and money, than invading an oil-producing
country.'

One of the concerns raised by the BIS is 'shortsightedness in
policy advice, which could turn today's solution into tomorrow's problem'.
The BIS says of the US: 'Given the size of the government deficit, the
obvious first step will be to cut expenditures and raise taxes.' It adds in
a masterpiece of understatement: 'While the administration has set a deficit
reduction objective, the specific policies required to implement this remain
to be put in place.'

The kind of specific policies Bush has gone in
for are tax cuts for the rich and an invasion of Iraq that has gone
disastrously wrong. These were both specific policies in the wrong
direction. As a senior international official recently observed, one cannot
blame the resulting rise in the US deficit on the Chinese desire to
save.

The Green
Party has drafted a bill to make it illegal for the New Zealand Cricket team
to tour Zimbabwe.

In Wellington today Green Party co-leader Rod
Donald said he was seeking cross-party support for the law which would make
it an offence for any New Zealand national sporting organisation to send a
team on tour to Zimbabwe.

The tour is under fire because of
human rights abuses in President Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe including the
bulldozing of slums which has left thousands homeless.

Australia and New Zealand's governments have already joined forces to oppose
the tour. The two countries' foreign ministers issued a statement this week
saying they would make joint representations to the International Cricket
Council urging rule changes to allow teams to cancel tours to countries
where serious human rights abuses were occurring.

They also want
the Group of Eight - leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy,
Japan, Russia and the United States - to tackle the Zimbabwe issue during
their summit at Gleneagles, near Edinburgh next week.

They want the
United Nations to investigate past and present abuses in Zimbabwe and
proposes that President Mugabe be referred to the International Criminal
Court.

However, New Zealand Cricket has said the tour must go
ahead because of the US$2 million fine the ICC would impose if it pulled
out.- NZPA, HERALD ONLINE STAFF